This invention relates to educational tools and instruments, more particularly to an apparatus and method of educating young children in recognizing and writing letters and numbers, in drawing basic objects of early-life learning, and in forming and writing words and sentences in relationship to such learning.
When young children are first learning to write letters and numbers they often find it very difficult to control the movement of their writing hand to properly form the letters and numbers. This difficulty may be due to lack of sufficient eye-hand coordination and muscle memory. Thus, there exists a need for an apparatus and method to improve such coordination and decrease the time it takes for children to learn how to write letters, numbers and even sentences.
Devices in the prior art consist of the well-known wax-like black or otherwise colored pad having a translucent sheet of plastic that is placed over it and written on with a stylus, wherein the lifting of the plastic sheet has an erasing effect.
Another example of prior art in this field includes U.S. Pat. No. 3,063,164. In that patent, there were templates traceable on plastic sheets on the front of the basic wax pad. But there was no means for holding the templates in lines for forming words. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,827,164, there was a means for holding characters and sentences in line, but the characters it contained in line were not templates that could be traced to provide initial training of young children in hand movement for forming characters. Also, the means for containing the characters and sentences in line were protrusions which could interfere with hand movement for effective writing and drawing.